Advances in the design of many complex systems such as those in the aerospace, automotive, marine and electronics industries have led to the development of numerous mutually dependent systems. Failures or malfunctions of one or more of these systems often affect other systems, directly or indirectly. Additionally, analysis of these failures/malfunctions and their direct and indirect effects is often required as part of a certification process. Typically such analyses are manually performed by groups of system analysts, without reference to a system or process capable of facilitating such analyses.
Data from failure analyses may be represented as graphical representations that convey information more clearly than text. Records (e.g., graphical representations, test plans) developed from this data may be used to evaluate the acceptability of failure analyses with federated systems as well as with integrated systems. Currently, these records may be created by different engineering organizations, each with their own perspective and interests, through time-consuming, manual methods, which may be prone to error and lack consistency and sufficient integration and controls.
In aircraft programs with federated systems, failure analyses can be straightforward, and usually involve a limited number of systems with easily-understood cascading aircraft-level effects. The records used to evaluate the acceptability of failure analyses with federated systems are usually limited to what an individual system expert deems sufficient, and failure evaluation can be made by a limited number of people.
When performed on complex aircraft systems with highly-integrated architectures, on the other hand, failure analyses can involve many systems with complex cascading effects and aircraft-level impacts that are not easily understood without a complete picture of the event. In order to make a valid assessment of a failure analysis in this environment, there are many more stakeholders who must be involved than would be required to evaluate a failure in a federated system environment. Each of these stakeholders has a particular layout of the failure event that they may be particularly interested in (all of which are valid). All layouts of the failure event must be considered together with all stakeholders to ensure a proper assessment has been made and that the aircraft will maintain an adequate level of safety. Older practices are sufficient for aircraft with federated systems (e.g., individual system experts utilize layouts they deem sufficient to evaluate failure scenarios usually contained within their system), but they are not sufficient for the current generation of aircraft when it comes to evaluating failures.
A challenge lies in creating these products/records/layouts, which have typically been manually created in various formats by different groups. The challenges are threefold—maintaining consistency among the different products, reducing the resources/time spent in developing the products, and creating alerts for changes.